Vikram Seth’s blockbuster “A Suitable Boy” has 20th anniversary

The international bestseller, “A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth, celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2013. I’ve just re-read it, and it’s just as good as I remembered. One of the longest novels ever published in one volume — at 1,474 pages in paperback — it’s an epic tale set in India a few years after Independence, with lyrical writing and vibrant characters.

Despite its massive length, it’s got an enormous and dedicated fan club. I’m not the only person to love it so much that I read it again — some fans read it twice when it first came out in 1993, and re-read it again recently. I just re-read it along with my friend Marjorie, who texted me: “I’m coming into the home stretch now (last 350 pages) and slowing down because I don’t want it to end.” Then, when she finished: “Now whatever I read for awhile will pale in comparison.”

A Suitable Boy starts with a mother who is trying to find a suitable husband for her daughter, Lata, kicking off with this simple sentence: “You too will marry a boy I choose,” said Mrs. Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.

But Lata hates the idea of an arranged marriage, so not only does she rebel against her mother’s wishes, but the Hindu teenager falls in love with a witty, handsome Muslim boy. As the book unfolds, with the plot expanding like bread rising, there are multiple doorways into Hindu-Muslim friends and enemies in the years after Partition, and the bloodshed that followed.

The book centers on four families, some Muslim, some Hindu. It’s a wonderfully crafted look at daily life, from cities to villages, including shoe-makers, politicians, cabaret singers, Urdu teachers, and maharajahs who’ve lost their power. I’m a fan of 19th-century novels and authors like Tolstoy, Balzac, Dickens and Dostoevsky, and this book fits in that vein, richly detailed and imaginative, but grounded in social and political history.

It looks at love, and what constitutes true love in a lasting marriage. It looks at caste, and how the “untouchables” fared in the new India. It’s rich with details of religious festivals, both Hindu and Muslim, and looks at religion in politics after Gandhi’s death – even then, as today, fundamentalists were brutal and deadly.

When you reach the last page, you get the same bereft feeling that came with the final episode of “The Sopranos” or “The Wire,” an irreplaceable and beloved world now shuttered forever, except in reruns or re-reads.